The Catalogue of Meteorites

The
Catalogue of Meteorites is the world taxonomic database
of all meteorite falls and finds.

The
first edition was published in 1847 and consisted of a three-page
pamphlet listing the 62 Meteorites in the British Museum,
the natural history collections of which went on to become the British
Museum (Natural History) now The Natural History Museum. Twenty
similar catalogues of first The Collection of Aërolites,
and then The Collection of Meteorites, followed at regular
intervals up until 1877. In 1881 the newly appointed Keeper of Minerals,
Lazarus Fletcher, included a discussion 'on meteorites' with the
catalogue. This evolved through 11 editions, the discussion, or
'guide', growing from 17 to 58 pages. In 1923 George Prior, Fletcher's
successor as Keeper of the Mineral Department, published the first
global Catalogue of Meteorites ('with special reference
to those represented in the collection of the British Museum (Natural
History)'). Max Hey continued the Catalogue, first publishing
supplements to Prior's work in 1927 and 1940 and then second and
third editions of the Catalogue in 1953 and 1966. A fourth
edition, edited by Andrew Graham, Alex Bevan and Robert Hutchison,
was published in 1985. The fifth edition of the Catalogue of Meteorites,
published in September 2000 by Cambridge
University Press, expands the information incorporated into
previous editions. It includes the names of all well-authenticated
meteorites known up to December 1999 (22,507 in total), even if
no material has been preserved.

The
printed version of the Catalogue is accompanied by a CD-ROM
containing the database that is the Catalogue of Meteorites.
The Catalogue is simply a template into which information about
a meteorite, or set of meteorites, is called. The template is a
form with seven 'pages', each page covering specific types of information,
on locality, classification, analytical data, bibliography etc.

Information
from the Catalogue is also summarised in the following
tables, downloadable as text files: